


Men Are Not Such Lovely Creatures

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Chicago Blackhawks, Multi, religious angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 19:32:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5139878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Artemi has thoughts.  He doesn't understand why.  He just wants to be good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Men Are Not Such Lovely Creatures

Artemi just wants to know what he's getting into. That doesn't seem too much to ask.

Now, if only he knew how to ask at all. He can't ask his teammates - that, he thinks, would not go over well. He does know that over the summer, some of them took the Stanley Cup to a pride parade, which he has seen pictures of. He is not exactly sure what's going on - they tried to explain it was for homosexuals, but Artemi isn't clear on why anyone would be proud of that. He's not proud of it.

Not that he's a homosexual. He just has thoughts. He keeps trying to make them go away.

In the pictures, young men (and older men, and girls) kiss each other in front of the Stanley Cup. That seems disrespectful. Artemi wishes he could do that. With Viktor. Only, not on the street, and not with people taking photos. Maybe not even in front of the Cup. Maybe he just wants to kiss Viktor. Maybe he wants to kiss him more than once.

Maybe a few hundred times.

He absolutely cannot ask God. As it is, he wakes up with his sheets all sticky and his dick still semi-hard, and then the first thing he sees is the icon he brought from home, Mary and Jesus, and he touches his crucifix compulsively and feels absolutely _rotten_. The only thing he asks God for is how to be better, so he doesn't think these thoughts. He asks God to love him. He signed with the Blackhawks and Viktor followed - he isn't sure if that means God loves him or God is testing him.

(sometimes, he wants vainly to believe that God does not condemn love, but it's not love, it's not, it's that rutting, sweaty feeling that strays his hand to his dick and not his cross, the thing that makes him bite his lip and lights his skin on fire thinking: yes, yes, yes. What is yes?)

He could ask the internet. His English is not good enough to ask what he means. If he asks in Russian, he doesn't get the answers he wants. Sometimes he gets pictures of churches. God is testing him, surely. He picks up words from insults spat around the ice - _faggot_ , someone calls him. He asks Jonny what that means. He looks it up on Google. _Faggot sex_ , he types. 

The pictures are worse. They confirm what he knows already: he is a bad person. 

He still dreams about Viktor. He still touches himself thinking about Viktor. He wears pajama pants to bed on the road because he rooms with Viktor, which he can't object to. He'd rather sleep naked. He'd rather sleep with Viktor. Viktor doesn't sleep naked, but Artemi knows what his dick looks like. It's pleasant to imagine. Until he remembers that he's bad and then his stomach twists and he can't sleep and when he wakes up he's sticky again.

Viktor takes him to dinner. At a sushi restaurant. Viktor ties his hair back and wears a shirt that buttons and he's not even on a road trip. Artemi tries to imagine what Viktor is like flirting with a girl. Artemi's insides sizzle: he is not a girl. But Viktor insists on paying and scolds him for trying to pick the cheapest thing on the menu, like maybe a salad.

Artemi, he says, when have you ever eaten a salad without a coach looking over your shoulder?

Artemya, I thought you liked sushi.

He fucking loves sushi. Korkino is not exactly near the ocean, and until he came to the US, he'd never really had it. Viktor had made him try it. He was not sure about it, at first - fish? Rice? Fish and rice were alright. But they come wrapped in these little rolls and _he's not sure what kind of fish that is and he almost stabs himself in the nose with chopsticks and what is that green stuff oh god his mouth is on fire._

He fucking loves sushi - he could eat the restaurant. Even the octopus. Viktor laughs at him, trying to order a salad, what are you, a rabbit? 

Sometimes he looks up and Viktor is watching him with his eyes high-water, sweet and flashing, not like when he scores, but like when he's just skating. Just skating, and the stands are empty, and practice is all but over and they're laughing, just skating. 

Why is he doing this? Why is Viktor doing this, and looking at him, and smiling? Artemi is going to dream about that smile and he's going to hate himself. He's going to ask the internet and it's going to show him pictures of what he wants and he's going to be terrified that somehow everybody knows what he's looking for and they're going to know what he is and God will never let him in. Not ever.

The day they get back from DC, Artemi goes to church. No one is in the church - he found the church with google, too, and his stomach sours at the thought of God and his desires sharing the same search bar. No one is in the church and it smells like velvet and wood polish and incense, good, clean, kind things, the memories of childhood. Stiff leather shoes, stiff starched collar. Sit up. Watch the priest. Behold the mysteries of God. Pray. The Mother Mary merciful in intercession. Fervently, he prays. He prays until his hands are sore from clenching them together. He looks in the hymnal, traces the words smudged by a hundred years of soft, sinful hands.

Artemi leaves the church. October, damp in the air. Chicago always smells faintly wet. Getting on through autumn - the sad little trees lining the city sidewalks are turning yellow and gold and red. Usually when he leaves the church he feels better, but Viktor keeps looking at him with sweet eyes (like honey, he thinks, like the light catching honey as it leaves the spoon). Viktor's eyes are beautiful. How can he think of a man as beautiful? Men, he thinks, are not lovely creatures by definition. God made man in his own image, but perhaps forgot the details.

Intently, he watches American television. The words are a mystery to him, a wash as curious and undulant as high Latin, without the comfort of God and gold. But he sees the things he understands to be important to Americans: here are beautiful women, and handsome men. Here are women and men together. Here are men who would be called in English _faggots_. The men look like _him_ , he realizes, appalled. Slight. Narrow-faced. Pale. Decorous, bejeweled. They walk with a sway, they speak in a rhythm he cannot define. Artemi tries to think if he has seen such men in Russia, men who sink their hips into their walk, who preen. He compiles a list of things that decent American men do and do not do, according to the television. Good men eat a lot of meat and have sex with women and watch American football and don't go shopping. Weak men like salad and sodomy and fancy soap. Sometimes American men have bellies and a lot of hair, sometimes they are muscled and bare.

Artemi watches to see which of his teammates attract the most girls. Many girls come to him. He doesn't know what to say. English escapes him. Even in Russia, he was tongue-tied, and Viktor had to rescue him. Of course, Viktor would rescue him, with his smooth charm and his California hair. Viktor talking to the girls for him, smoothing the way.

After a game, his hair still damp and just beginning to spring into defiant curls, women sidle up to him for autographs and photos. Women come with a photograph, a magazine, a jersey. Some men come with binders full. His hand gets tired. A girl about his age lays her hand on his and lingers. Patrick Kane says: she wants to fuck you. Artemi understands this, in English, but nothing happens when he looks at her. He should have sex with her. She wants to. He is supposed to want to. There are a lot of things he doesn't enjoy, like leg days and early morning practice and American coffee (no one drinks _tea_ here), but he does them anyway because they are necessary and make the people around him happy. She wants to fuck him, that's what Patrick Kane says, so he follows her. Viktor is somewhere else. He takes her in his car and she directs him not to a house but to a parking lot off the highway, sparse with three cars, two tractor-trailers, and a small building with men's and women's toilets and a pepsi cola machine out front lit by a pale yellow lamp around which, even in October, moths still float.

She touches him in the car. His eyelids droop. He looks into the darkness, into the thick brush beyond the guardrail. He's still in his game-day clothes, his tie, and he looks down where she is touching him and his pants are open and his shirt-tails are rucked around his erection, as if framing it in some expensive exhibition. His tie catches in her hair when she bends over his lap. His tie that Viktor gave him because he insisted. All his ties were awful. It's not his fault. St Petersburg gave them suits to wear. 

The girl - woman - says something to him and he doesn't know what. Shakes his head mutely. She is eyeballing him. She is stroking his dick. He's not hard. He breathes deep and licks his lips _enjoy this_ and thinks of Viktor. Long dark blond hair. Color of wheat in the wind. The long fields outside Chicago. Korkino is mining country, hills and coal. Viktor. He clenches the seat. _Enjoy this_.

Viktor would not do this for him but it's nice to imagine. It's so nice. He imagines some more. He imagines until he comes. The woman (girl) spits out the window of his car and pats his hand and calls him 'cute' and something else. 

"You want going home?" He asks. He is zipping his pants and his shirttails hang out. She touches his face and he takes her home.

He drives and tries not to cry. He doesn't understand why he's like this. He can't understand what he did for God to ostracize him so. He wants intercession, he wants forgiveness, he wants to be welcomed again to divine hope. So he drives and tries not to cry. Everything in Chicago is damp. He drives to Viktor's place because God does not want him so maybe Viktor will. 

"Viktor," he blurts, at the door, where Viktor is looking at him, sleepy and soft-eyed, "Vitya, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." 

Viktor, half asleep, hair not tied back, falling around his eyes, tucked behind his ear: "Come in, stupid. Sorry for what?"

Artemi dabs at his eyes with his tie and Viktor tsks at him.

"C'mon, man. That's expensive. What's wrong, Temik?"

"God doesn't love me, Viktor."

"Jesus, Temik, are you drunk?"

He is not drunk, he is crying. "I had sex with a girl and I couldn't even get it up for her. I can't do it. I can't."

"Oh," Viktor says, as if he doesn't care. "Oh, that's all? Temya, no one gives a fuck here. Come on. Come in. You look like shit. Come have some tea. Or orange juice. Or whatever." He stumbles, still not quite awake, into his kitchen. He is wearing just pajama pants and his back is stupidly, aggravatingly appealing.

"Vitya - "

"What?"

God doesn't love him so it doesn't matter. "I was thinking about you. When I did it. With the girl."

Viktor drops the mug he's taking down from the shelf. Drops it on his foot. "Son of a _bitch_ ," he barks. 

Artemi sort of collapses onto Viktor's countertop.

"I mean," Viktor says, inspecting the mug for damage, "shit, you couldn't have told me sooner? Here I am trying to wine and dine you, and you liked me the whole goddamn time?"

"God - "

"Temik." Viktor's voice softens, heavy like morning clouds, like the sun not breaking. "God made you. God made us all. God - " He pauses. " - you know, my mom, she said to me, Viktor, God made all the world, and He did it for a reason. God made us, and He loves what he made."

The thought strikes him. The loving God of gold and stained glass light. Mary and the baby Jesus. In the house of the lord as a child he prayed: let me be more like you, oh Lord, tell me how to be like everyone else.

Viktor says now: God made me and you the way He wanted. _Nothing is wrong with you, Temik._

Artemi can't bear the thought that Viktor would burn in hell. Viktor is too kind, his hair too golden, his grin too full of mischief. Viktor loves him. Viktor wants to be with him, he thinks, and how can that be, when Viktor is kind and good? What gulf of penitence separates them? What peace has Viktor made with God?

Viktor and his pillow-soft voice come close and wrap around him. He is really not much smaller than Viktor but he feels it, in that moment. He feels like a whisper, and Viktor is the shout of color on autumn leaves, he is mountains in a squinting distance. Viktor wraps him up like don't forget which one of us is older, Temya. Viktor's rough stubble - a variance of beard - on his face, his cheek. Viktor's lips are softer as his voice: whisper. Viktor loves him, the way the sky loves the sea. Expansive. Holy, perhaps. The thought trembles at the forefront of his mind. Holy is the love ordained by God. God chose our hearts, and plucked their first beat as if some long and tremulous note held in the sanctuary: listen. Rise up, join voice.

What is this new and blinding world he finds, behind the door of Viktor's arms and kindest voice.

"God loves us," Artemi murmurs. "How do you know that, Vitya?"

"Faith," Viktor says firmly. "Just take it on faith, Temya."

Faith: behold the glass and light. The voice of God rises in every chest which was set to life in motion by the Lord long long ago. Faith: the belief in the unseen and unproven, that which is like miracles, or love.

Take it on faith. Faith is tenuous in this hour, and he leans into Viktor's chest. Slinks himself down compact, listen: the unseen, the beat of a heart, like Christ ablaze in iconic glory. Listen, unseen: believe.


End file.
